Velvet Goldmine

All posts tagged Velvet Goldmine

Several reports at once here. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the edition of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde that I’ve got on Goodreads, so here’s the closest cover I could find.

The one I have is a Barnes & Noble edition from 1994, long before they were doing the leatherbound thing. (Which I found at a local used store.) It’s got this photo on the cover, but a bit smaller, and tinted slightly blue. And despite that it calls itself “Complete” it isn’t really complete. The things most people want to read are all there — Dorian Gray, the plays, and the short stories — and there’s a lot of poetry, though I haven’t bothered to look up if it’s all the poetry. (And it claims to have an introduction by George Bernard Shaw, but what it actually has is a letter from him to an early Wilde biographer recounting his own memories of Oscar Wilde. Which is far from being an introduction in any standard sense. It was interesting stuff (and in one place wonderfully useful to me) but not an introduction.) But there are only a handful of letters and essays. Which, for most people, is probably not much loss, because most people are likely to only want the fiction, whether in prose or play form.

And no, I haven’t read the entire thing cover to cover. It’s about 1200 pages, so that’s a lot of reading. But I have some reports on the individual pieces I have read. (And I plan to read more of the pieces later.) Read the rest of this entry →

I’m not quite sure what, but something is just a little off from what it had been.

I mean, some of it’s the same. I’ve been obsessed with writing fanfic for Velvet Goldmine since July’s CampNaNo session, and that hasn’t changed (despite coming up with what feels like a really good idea for an original novel series in the meantime), but the stuff I’ve been writing has been. I’m not sure if that’s a maturation of my interest, a reaction to the real world, a suggestion that maybe I’m starting to tire of it, or what, but it’s kind of been weirding me out a little.

So, when I started, it was mostly just “how can I get my two favorite characters to hook up and have their happily ever after?” (Because I am, at heart, a very shallow person who would prefer to live in a fairy tale world. Especially since this one sucks.) Of course, there was usually some situation going on outside their relationship that needed resolving, often relating to the reporter managing somehow to expose the conspiracy behind the scenes of the 1984 section of the film. Now, it’s not like those elements have gone away, of course. Getting them together is still the primary goal of almost every one of my fics. (There have been a couple of really short ones that didn’t do that at all.) Or rather, I should say that it starts out as a primary goal. Lately they’ve been twisting and going strange (and dark) places I didn’t intend as I started writing them.

Take, for example, the one I’m about 75% finished with right now. The idea was to take the surveillance the rock star is under in the movie (almost certainly a temporary measure in canon) and imagine it carried further, where he’s under an unknown amount of constant surveillance, preventing them from being able to simply start dating like a normal couple. So what happens is that he knows there’s a wiretap on his phone line (I never had him explain how he knows that, though), and he assumes he’s also under scrutiny whenever he goes to public places, though he isn’t quite sure how much scrutiny. The premise, therefore, was that they can only get together in his apartment, on weekends, and have a very awkward relationship until they finally decide to leave the country to get away from those surveilling them. It was supposed to be the usual romantic fluff. Somehow it’s turned into a festival of paranoia and failure to communicate. They’re both totally convinced the other one doesn’t have any genuine feelings for them, and that whatever they have will be ended at any second. And at this point, they’ve already moved to London together, but they’re still thinking that way. (Okay, actually, as of Sunday night, the rock star is starting to believe the reporter really does love him, because the reporter was about the write the exposé that the rock star thought was his only goal in the relationship, but then changed his mind and decided not to write it, giving three reasons, one of which being that it would bring their relationship under too much harsh scrutiny. But the reporter is more convinced than ever that he’s entirely unloved.) I’m really not sure how that happened. The weird thing is that while it’s not entirely in character for them to be so paranoid, it’s not entirely out of character, either.

In another one, I realized I’d written myself into a situation where they had to break up for about six months in the middle of the piece. That was odd, too, but it feels a bit more natural. (In fact, that one may be my favorite I’ve written so far.) In another, my decision to play around with the idea of the reporter’s brother turning up in the employ of the government agency that’s behind the conspiracy turned really dark. Like, his brother ordered him beaten up and killed. Thankfully, rescue arrived before the killing part could happen, but the poor reporter spent the whole rest of the story covered in bruises. Again, very odd. (Especially since I hate real world-style violence (fantasy violence is a different matter), and the movie has pretty much zero violence in it.) And yes, I have a whole lot of fics for this movie by now. (Most of which are only half-edited, and therefore haven’t even been posted to AO3 yet. I have to take it a bit slow on the posting, anyway; I don’t want to have two of my pieces right next to each other in the chronological posting list if I can avoid it, because it just looks bad. (I wasn’t thinking about that at first, so early on, there are places where I have three in a row, and it makes me cringe.) Which is annoying, ’cause I just finished posting something, and now I have to wait for someone else to post something before I can put up anything else. Especially annoying because someone posted something the day before I put up the final chapter. So if they’d just waited one more day before posting…!)

Anyway, long story short, I feel like my writing’s getting away from me a bit. Maybe I’m just stressed out from work and school and having been sick for the entire month of March. (Which is when I wrote all of that still-unfinished piece, btw.) If it’s not stress, I’m not sure what the change indicates, or if it’s anything I can — or even should — try to fix. (After all, these darker pieces are definitely better than the light fluffy ones I started out with, so maybe I shouldn’t be complaining.)

Addressing the suggested question for this month, about using April A-to-Z to publicize a novel, well, I’ve never published anything, but if I do write that original series I mentioned above, and if I decide to self-pub it as I mentioned in an earlier post, maybe I should think about doing that. Might be an interesting thing to use April A-to-Z for, if one was careful to be interesting and not make it just boring, shameless advertising. (Sadly, I’m not doing the challenge this year, unlike the past two years. I meant to spend all year getting ready for it, another nice, research-intensive world mythology theme, but…I kept putting it off for one reason or another, and never got the research completed. And I have a lot of work to do this month for school, so…school work is always more important than blogging, and therefore I just can’t do the challenge the way I want to. And I’d rather not do it than to do a half-assed job of it.)

What I’m about to quote to you (with one mild edit for language of the sort I don’t use on my blog) comes from the story I was writing in late October, to which my NaNo novel was a sequel. I’d been working on the same scene (a press conference being held by a rock star and his boyfriend, whose relationship had recently had recently been exposed (in every sense of the word) by a sleazy paparazzi-type in a tabloid) for a while, and had started to lose touch with it, I suppose…

“You better believe it!” Curt laughed, before kissing him passionately. Arthur could hear the flashbulbs going off, but he couldn’t force himself to break away from the kiss. It felt too good. And, deep down, a part of him hoped that maybe photos of them kissing might help other young men accept themselves the way photos of Curt and Brian had helped him. Even having that thought made Arthur hate himself for putting on such airs. That he would have the nerve to compare himself to Brian — to imagine that he could ever be even a quarter as important to Curt as Brian had been — shocked and disgusted him. No matter what Brian had become since, he had been the love of Curt’s life, and Arthur knew that wasn’t going to change for someone as pathetic as he was.

The reporters were already shouting more questions by the time they parted. “What else are we supposed to be asking you, man? This scene is growing tedious!”

“You’re telling me? Let’s get the f*** out of here.”

As you may have guessed, they weren’t supposed to say any of that…but yes, I really did find myself typing that as I realized I didn’t remember what else I needed the reporters to ask them.

(Yeah, I’m still hooked on writing Velvet Goldmine fanfic. Actually been posting this one to AO3, in fact. Though I haven’t gotten this far in the posting yet. Oh, uh, spoiler warning. If anyone happens to see this who’s been reading it. Which seems unlikely at best.)

Though CampNaNo is over, I don’t feel the usual release I have after the actual NaNo. Normally, by Dec. 1, I’m free of what I’ve been writing, and can move on to other things.

But this time I’m still obsessed.

Admittedly, in part that’s because I’m looking the piece over to fix the worst problems so I can send it to one of the people from my cabin as a beta reader prior to possibly posting it on a fanfic site, but that doesn’t really cover the crux of the problem: these characters haven’t let go of my brain yet.

Which wouldn’t be a problem if they were my characters.

I’d try inventing original characters similar to them for an original work, but the last time I tried that (NaNo 2012) it didn’t work in any regard: by the time Dec. 1 rolled around, the characters were utterly unlike the ones they started out as, I was horribly disappointed by the book (to the extent that I’ve never once re-opened the file to have another look at it), and the new characters never took up residence in my head for a minute, not even while I was writing it.

Anyway, while I’m still afraid I’ve re-opened the fanfic floodgates (there are so many other things I want to write about these characters!), I’m trying to focus right now on what the heck I want to do in fixing this story up. (“Story,” she says. About a 155k behemoth.)

The biggest problem — other than the inconsistent pacing, lack of description, spotty characterization and dangling plot threads that are typical of me — is this one particular sequence relatively early on.

Okay, so my piece gets its two romantic leads from the movie, the reporter and the rock star. (Which would be a great title for it if it was just about their romance.) At the start of the fic, the reporter is already essentially in love with the rock star, though he’s not quite prepared to use those words to describe it. And he doesn’t figure he’s ever going to see the rock star again, so he’s mostly just trying not to think about him. Only then he goes to his favorite bar for a drink on Saturday night, and the rock star just happens to be there. (Which reminds me, I need to explain what the heck he was doing there…) Well, this obviously does nothing to reduce his romantic feelings for the other man, but he’s still trying to fight it. Only then, the next Saturday, he goes back to the same bar (well, it’s more of a club than a bar, actually) and runs into the rock star again. (That one I did explain.)

Now, here is where the difficulty comes in. Because by the time I was writing that scene, I already had in mind several other scenes about their relationship: two in between scenes of the reporter pining for the rock star, the scene where the rock star shows up at the reporter’s apartment completely wasted and they end up having rather unsatisfying sex, and then the first time we get the rock star’s POV which ends with them having much nicer sex. (Yeah, I know, there are a lot of problems with that.)

And the difficulty in that? Because the rock star had only gone back to that bar in the first place because he was hoping to run into the reporter again, in order to score with him, trying to keep them from hitting the sack together at the end of the second bar scene was so difficult that the only way I found to do it was to have four horny fangirls show up and chase the reporter away. Which isn’t very convincing (said girls being in the 18-22 range, and said rock star being 37), is awfully (in)convenient timing, and isn’t much fun to read. Plus it really ticked off the rock star (in that he felt the reporter had abandoned him to his vulture-like fans), so that when he next shows up, he’s incredibly angry (he does that) and calling the reporter some very not-nice names, to the point that it was actually physically difficult for me to write it. (He uses a particular profanity a lot in the movie, one which I really don’t like and never use myself (a very rare thing), and though I have no trouble typing it normally, because it was aimed at the reporter, it took me like half an hour to get that part of the scene written, because my fingers so didn’t want to type that.)

The real problem is that I don’t like the idea of just re-writing the scene so that the girls don’t show up and the leads hook up a bit over a week early. Because the two scenes of the reporter pining for the rock star are really…it would be going too far to say that they’re good, per se, but let’s suffice it to say that I really like them, particularly the one where he goes to a gay bar in the hopes of having a one-night stand to make him forget the rock star, only to get jealous when the sound system starts playing a love duet sung by the rock star and one of his exes. And that’s the one that can’t still be used. The other one — in which he goes to hear the rock star performing live at a local night club — could be adapted and kept, but the gay bar scene absolutely would make no sense if they’d already hooked up, and putting it before their second in-fic meeting is too soon: they only met twice in the movie (yet I am absolutely not inventing the reporter’s feelings for the rock star) so for him to be that obsessed that quickly would be a bit much. In fact, it’s really kind of pushing it to have it after their second in-fic meeting.

*sigh*

Well, that’s something I’m hoping the beta reader can help me with.

I also have something like 8 or 9 temp names that need replacing with real names. Characters have temp names like Ughanother Nameneededhere and Ihate Namingcharacters. Things I can swap out easily with “find – replace”…if I can come up with names for them. (For a fanfic, it has a ludicrous number of OCs. Probably because the nature of the story requires a ton of characters for them to interact with, which the movie does not provide, particularly in the 1984 section.)

…

I think I had more I wanted to say, but my back is now screaming at me that it’s time to lie down, so I’m just going to cut off this rambling mess of a post here.

Tomorrow will hopefully be back to my regularly scheduled programming.

Well, so I’m back from CampNaNo. (Not that I strictly speaking went anywhere, but you know what I mean.) It was both an eventful month and an uneventful month, in that I did very little other than write. So it was eventful for the characters, and not so much for me. But that’s as it should be, right?

Um, okay, maybe not.

Anyway…

Anyone who’s been reading my blog from before I suddenly went walkabout (basically, around this May) will undoubtedly realize that I had no trouble getting to the typical NaNo 50k. Which is what I put in for my Camp goal, because I didn’t really care how many word I got written. Why would I, y’know? My writing is naturally excessively verbose, so word counts have never really mattered to me; what matters is finishing the story.

And the fact that I’ve got a winner’s badge means I finished it!

Somehow.

On the last day.

At 155k words.

Which is probably a good five times as many words as are in the screenplay of the movie it’s a fanfic of. (Okay, actually, I have no idea how many words are typically in a screenplay. But there’s a lot of time in the movie devoted to ’70s-style music videos, and to concert performances, so it’s gotta have fewer words than most.)

The dialog is bloated, the descriptions virtually non-existent (seriously), subplots I planned to include are introduced and then forgotten, a large chunk of time was devoted to one romantic lead pining for the other while assuming he’d never be interested even though I had to literally wedge a handful of horny college coeds in between them to keep them from getting it on in their previous scene together, and the two leads undoubtedly spend more time out of character than in it. (Though in my defense on that last part, going all ooc with Curt was an inevitability, because he spent 90% of his screen time silent, singing, stoned or in a fit of rage. There wasn’t much time for him to be particularly well characterized. Also, I put both characters in all kinds of weird situations that the movie absolutely did not prepare them to deal with. Er, didn’t prepare me to know how they would deal with them?) Also, I’m sure that most of Arthur’s dialog and POV narration is entirely too American for an English character, and probably there are tons of anachronisms all over the place. (Hey, I turned 9 in the year it’s taking place. I don’t remember much!)

I actually had more trouble finishing than I should have, which is probably why the ending is rushed and o’er hasty. Because I pretty much lost all of this past Thursday. I was stretching my back on Wednesday night, trying to the get the “I’ve been writing all month and my back is killing me” kinks out of it. My favorite stretch is simply to bend down and touch my toes, holding for a while in that position. (Yeah, lame, I know.) Anyway, there I was, at midnight on Wednesday, standing on my bed (probably where the problem came in) to touch my toes, and it felt like something shifted sideways. It hurt so badly I felt nauseous, and I kept wiggling my toes to make sure that my spine was still connected; I was seriously afraid that I had shifted a vertebra out of position and was in danger of severing my spinal column at any moment.

Obviously, it wasn’t anything so terrifying. It was some kind of muscle thing. I went in to an Urgent Care place the next morning for some X-rays, and it was diagnosed as back strain/sprain, and they gave me some prescriptions for pain pills, and told me to spend the next couple of days lying on my back with my knees bent for as much time as possible.

I can’t write in that position.

Even worse, my father had been champing at the bit for me and my brother to come over and watch the “Ultimate Edition” Blu-Ray of Batman v Superman with him, because he hates watching anything alone and my mother didn’t want to waste three hours of her life on that. (While I don’t blame her, in theory, she didn’t actually use that time for anything to speak of.) I was not in the right frame of mind for that…though it may be that there is no such thing as the right frame of mind for that, particularly for me. (And if it turns out Suicide Squad isn’t worth watching, then that was a total waste of my time, since that was the only reason I agreed in the first place.)

Anyway, I did do a tiny bit of writing Thursday night. Then on Friday I spent all day alternating between brief periods of writing lying on my back moaning. Not really a lot of fun.

And then Saturday and Sunday I had to work. And on Sunday they went and closed off the main east-west street I use to get to work, and it took me half an hour to find a go-around! I know it’s partially my own fault for not taking highways, but they’re not actually that much of a time-saver: it takes about 33 minutes by street to get from my house and the museum, and getting home on the highway on Sunday evening took about 20 minutes. So, yeah, there’s some time savings there, but not a significant amount. And some lunatic in an SUV almost killed me because he decided he wanted to get over two lanes and didn’t bother looking to see if anyone was, you know, in one of them! (Why is it that the worst drivers are always the ones in the gigantic vehicles that are guaranteed to kill anyone they hit?)

Okay, so, lengthy rambling needs to stop now, because my back is telling me it’s time to lie down again.

Oh, btw, in the week that I missed? I came back and found 48 posts I needed to read. Which is why this post is going up now and not three hours ago. (And no, I did not spend those three hours sitting up. I was lying on my back to read those posts.)

Anyway, I hope to return to my usual content soon. Though possibly not as quickly as I had initially hoped, what with the whole back thing.

I’m not sure if it was a good decision or a bad decision, but I think it was the only decision I could make.

I’m doing July’s session of CampNaNo.

Okay, that part is a good decision. No question of that.

But the part I’m still not sure about is that I’m writing fanfic. It’s the first fanfic I’ve written since…January of…2013? 2014? Well, one of those two. It was definitely in a January that I last touched fanfic.

I guess, looking at it that way, it doesn’t sound like a long time. And compared to the twentyish years I spent writing fanfic (exclusively for more than ten of those years) it really isn’t all that long a time. But I’d been proud of myself for getting away from fanfic and only writing original stuff. (Even though much of my “original” material wasn’t really all that original, being based heavily — or entirely — on Greek mythology.)

So why am I doing something I said I wouldn’t do again?

I feel like I didn’t have a choice. I mean, it’s been taking over my brain, so maybe if I write it all out, it’ll let go, and I can get back to the WIP that was already in progress. Right?

If pressed for details about my writing, I’ll usually admit pretty early on that I consider myself to be a reformed fan-fiction writer. Not that there’s anything wrong with writing fanfic, per se, just that it’s not something one can make a career of, and goodness knows I need to do anything I can to somehow start earning a living. (Though I am finally gainfully employed. But it’s only part-time at the moment, so my income is still considerably less than my outcome, as it were.) I’ve been fanfic-free since…hmm…well, since I started graduate school, actually.

It wasn’t actually graduate school that made me give up fanfic, though. I started writing a series of semi-YA books (I’ve talked about them before) and I was so sure that they were the ones, they were the ones I was finally going to be able to publish. Thus I didn’t want to waste time on anything else: I wanted to focus on finishing those, and then polishing them up for publication. (LOL!)

Even after I realized that there was no conceivable way that they were going to get published — not even self-published — I still felt like I would be “back-sliding” somehow if I ever returned to fanfic.

More importantly, I didn’t really feel the need.

I had spent years with Final Fantasy characters in my head, fighting for dominance with characters from other properties, or with characters from my own original stories, but since writing my semi-YA series, they just weren’t there anymore: they had vacated the premises, and frankly I felt no urge to go looking for them. (Kind of a ludicrous statement, considering I have two wall scrolls of one of those characters in my bedroom, and multiple statuettes and figurines of both of them. But looking at them and having them occupy my skull are very different things.)

This review is long overdue a re-write! So it’s finally getting one. (3/2/17, for a post first published on 5/27/16. Definitely long overdue!) I’ll leave the original review below in strikethrough, in case anyone’s curious to see what it said.

So, a proper review of my new favorite movie, Velvet Goldmine. It’s from 1998, but I only first saw it last May, mere days before it was taken down from Netflix. I had come across its thumbnail earlier in browsing through Netflix, and had clicked on it because I wondered what in the world the title meant.

(To be honest, I still don’t know what the title means.) Since I quoted the Netflix summaries before, I can give you both the shorter and longer version of their summaries. The “on mouse rollover” summary was:

Trying to find the man behind all the mystery, a journalist delves into the life of a missing glam rocker.

Clicking on it brought up this further summary:

A decade after a British glam-rocker fakes his assassination and disappears, a tabloid journalist is dispatched to deconstruct the star’s legend.

That’s all it said, along with the information that it starred Ewan McGregor, Johnathon Rhys-Meyers and Christian Bale. (Well, that’s what it said the first time I saw it on the Netflix list, months earlier. When I saw it there again in May, it had replaced Bale’s name with Toni Colette’s. Presumably because she’s third in the cast list and he’s fourth, but considering his character’s mentioned in the summary and hers isn’t…) And I must say in looking at that second summary, two things leap to mind. One: he is not a tabloid journalist! He works for a perfectly respectable newspaper (as far as we can tell, but he had previously been assigned to cover the visit of President Reynolds to NYC, which seems pretty legit to me). Two: the word “deconstruct” should officially be banned from use by all people who don’t know what it means.

So when I read the premise back whenever that was, I added it to my “to watch” list, for three reasons.

Two hot actors.

Intriguing plot, what little of it was described.

I was wondering why it was listed in the “Gay and Lesbian” section.

Yeah. Netflix failed to add that little tidbit to its summary. Oh, and the distributors of the DVD and Blu-ray versions? They failed to add that to their summaries, too. For that matter, the theatrical trailer didn’t even hint at it! I cannot imagine what I would have thought of this movie if I had discovered it in some other way. (Well, okay, actually, because of when I discovered it, I still would have liked it. If I’d seen it in the theaters when it came out without knowing what it really was, I have no idea how I would have reacted.)

A more accurate back-of-the-box blurb for the movie might be written as follows:

In a bleak, almost Orwellian version of 1984, a young reporter (Christian Bale) is given the assignment to write a retrospective on the career of legendary ’70s glam rock singer Brian Slade (Johnathon Rhys-Meyers). As he interviews Brian’s ex-wife Mandy (Toni Colette), the audience begins to see the other side of Brian’s career, especially his passionate affair with fellow rock star Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor). But no one seems willing to answer the question “whatever happened to Brian Slade?”

Of course, even that fails to do it justice. Most of the movie takes place during the 1970s, as you might expect, including the opening, before we get the first 1984 sequence. (Well, okay, actually the opening starts in the 19th century, with the birth — uh, arrival on this planet — of Oscar Wilde, but that’s a bit different.) You might be surprised by which primary cast member you meet first in that first 1974 sequence: Christian Bale’s. His character, Arthur Stuart, was a big fan of Brian’s in the ’70s, and was in the audience when he faked his own death on stage. (Which is, of course, where the movie starts.) So it’s rather odd that he’s the last name before the title, because he’s probably got the second largest amount of screen time in the film. (Not that I’ve timed it or anything. But he dominates the 1984 sequences, for obvious reasons, and we get a lot of his flashbacks to the ’70s, too. And he was still young enough in 1998 that he convincingly looked like a teenager in those sequences. Now that I’ve discovered Newsies is streaming on Hulu, I have to watch that and have a look at how his appearance in that compares to Arthur’s teenage self, since he’d have been about Arthur’s ’70s age when that was filmed. Also I’m curious if he was towering over the adults in the cast…plus I’m generally curious about the movie in the first place…)